Books: Flying Lady

SOARING WINGS—George Palmer Putnam—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Lanky, tousle-mopped Amelia Earhart, whom the Pacific swallowed two years ago, flew the Atlantic twice: in 1928 with a pilot (she never touched the controls); in 1932 solo. Soaring Wings, a family memoir by her publicity-loving husband, George Palmer Putnam, is full of scrappy, discursive trivia (Flier Earhart kept bowls of little yellow tomatoes around the house to eat at random, slept three nights in a new flying coat to get it suitably wrinkled) but does manage to tell how this four-year air change came about.

Aviator Earhart...